What's Been and What's Ben

I realized recently that the only thing that can make you think better is to think about how you think. This can lead to an infinitely cascaded set of reasoning that usually ends up with me contemplating if all this proton/neutron/electron stuff that I supposedly made of is real or not. Lost (brief mention) has the example where Sawyer confronted Jack about how he lead only by quick reactions rather than thinking things out.

Currently I am just clocking the hours until spring break when me and the lovely Morgan will go to visit Minneapolis for spring break. My current thinking is to fly up and then bus back because we don’t know when we exactly will want to leave. Larry, who graduated fall quarter, asshole, will be back in Terre Haute for the last weekend of break so we might go back early to see him and find out how West Virginia is going. Hopefully it will be warm there by then. It was snowing here in Terre Haute on Sunday morning. A bit late in the season and doubly annoying since it meant a cold ride in this morning. I had to wear long pants – a personal defeat.

Recently I switched over to non-graphing calculators. I now use a HP 35s – modeled after the original pocket calculator, the HP 35. It does a few more things! I uses RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) which in addition to being a good way to make a joke about Polish is also a cool way to do calculations that doesn’t require parentheses. I haven’t needed to graph anything in a while on the calculator level since I just use Maple 12 (classic, not the java-based garbage) for all of that. It has nice buttons that click when I press them and looks stylin’ as far as calculators go.

LOST has been really good lately and I like where it is going. House, 30 Rock, the Office, and the Daily Show/the Colbert Report have all been good lately. I have been watching the Flight of the Concords lately too and it is hilarious. I want to live in New Zealand now. Well, visit the old Lord of the Rings set and dance around in a tunic and cape. NZ has about 4 million people at a density of around that of South Dakota. They are very green (first non-nulcear) and have a similar standard of living as here.

I feel a sense of pride that I went into engineering over finance as if for me it was ever considered. Obama reinforced that and made me think of Wall Streeters as hollow men. We should invest a lot of money into sciengineering because we have never caused a recession – although we have gotten us out of a few. 1.2 million for investigating reducing cow smell is important to people who live around cows (good god fearing folks) and sh0ws me how out of touch Washington and Media people can be on issues that are real. We should not hyper-tax bonuses as much as the Robin Hood in me would like to do so. Obama knows it too or he would be on board because he knows as a former constitutional law professor that it sets a dangerous precedent. What we should do is prosecute those we can and to establish laws so we can punish people who pull these stunts in the future. Regulation of our functionality is important and one of the fundamental traits of living things.